Analysis

CLEVELAND — Hold onto your hats! Ohio’s recently passed Issue 1 could mean a lot of different things. Only time will tell exactly what Ohio voters did on Nov. 8. But voters across the country would be well-advised to study these developments carefully, as similar proposals are bound to show up in other states in future elections. Try not to fall asleep as you need on, as the issues are a little complex.

When hip-hop artist Kanye West said, “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people,” he caught the imagination of rebellious artists everywhere. People find it refreshing to hear such a bold, truthful and militant straight-from-the-heart speech in time of profound crisis.

In 1940 playwright and humorist George S. Kaufman, who made his living mocking everyone, wrote a satirical story titled “The Great Caviar Riots” for The Nation magazine. In the story he mocks both the culture of protest and members of the upper classes, who take to the streets to regain their culinary class privileges.

The people of Groton and New London, Conn., breathed a loud collective sigh of relief last week when the Base Realignment and Closure Commission (BRAC) voted to remove their naval base from the list of bases to be closed. For months, since the Pentagon’s list was first published, the entire community was on edge.

Following Katrina’s devastation, the president could crack down on the real looters by sending the National Guard to Houston and Irving, Texas, and San Ramon, Calif., the headquarters of ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and ChevronTexaco.

NEW ORLEANS — I had never visited a city ravaged by war, but as I drove across the Mississippi Bridge into the heart of this devastated city with People’s Weekly World reporter Tim Wheeler last week, I felt that I was in a war zone. Debris filled the streets and a dreadful stench filled the air. Buildings were boarded up and the city’s celebrated music had gone silent.

His “crimes” include acting as a democratically elected president of a sovereign Venezuela; rejecting the principles embodied in the Monroe Doctrine (i.e., “Latin America is the U.S.A.’s backyard”); challenging neoliberal doctrines that serve the interest of global corporations rather than social development; seeking to solidify the economic and political integration of South America based on the principles of equal exchange and mutually beneficial cooperation; and using Venezuela’s oil income to benefit the majority of Venezuelans rather than an elite few.

Ecuador, an impoverished country of 13 million people, is emerging as a major headache for the Bush administration. The people of this oil-rich nation just ousted their third president within seven years and show little sign of accepting the status quo.
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On April 21 in Geneva, Switzerland, the UN Human Rights Commission (HRC) rejected a watered-down Cuban resolution asking the United States to let an HRC team check on the widely reported mistreatment of U.S. prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Refusing to be silenced by the Bush administration’s National Labor Relations Board, graduate student teachers at Yale and Columbia went on strike last week in the first ever Ivy League coordinated job action.